Entertainment

'The Elder Scrolls Online': Stuck Between Identities, Failing at Both

At first glance, it seems like the ideal marriage: The Elder Scrolls franchise, which has produced open-world RPG mega-hits like Skyrim and Oblivion, and massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. They’re both open world, they’re both RPGs, and they’re both rife with powerful wizards and fearless knights.

The Elder Scrolls Online seeks to make the union, but in an effort to please fans of both types of games, publisher ZeniMax has delivered something of a letdown to both sides.

It’s not as if The Elder Scrolls Online is a bad game, mind you. It’s okay. But when you’re up against a titan like World of Warcraft and succeeding a one-of-a-kind blockbuster like Skyrim, okay isn’t good enough.

If you’re part of either target audience, you might be interested in checking it out regardless. I’m a decades-long veteran of both the MMO genre and The Elder Scrolls franchise, so let’s dive into the details.

Exploring Tamriel

In The Elder Scrolls Online, you can explore the entire continent of the franchise’s fictional world of Tamriel, not just one province, as was the case in most of the previous games. But in truth, the continent is broken up into three chunks, with half of it yet to be implemented.

The art for both characters and environments is gorgeous – it rivals anything from the single-player games. Character customization is top-notch, both in terms of visuals and combat skills.

The books and characters in the world will give Tamriel lore geeks a lot to be excited about, and it’s cool to see some places that have only been hinted at in other games. That will be enough to sway you if you’re really into the franchise.

That said, there’s not much new to see for Elder Scrolls fans beyond arcane lore. The game plays like a tour of greatest hits without introducing any new concepts, which each single-player entry has done. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have the cultural depth or variety the franchise is known for.

This is most evident in the quest writing. The same tropes are recycled over and over again. It usually goes like this: A ghost appears to you as you walk by a ruined town, and asks you to avenge his or a family member’s death. Dig a little deeper and you discover it’s all because someone tapped into some forbidden demonic power and doomed the village with his or her hubris. Now repeat that story hundreds of times over hundreds of hours.

There are few quests like the clever Daedric quests of Skyrim, which are full of antics, unexpected twists and lovable, weird characters. There’s no sense of place or time in the dialogue. Everyone across Tamriel talks about the same things in the same way.

Of course, The Elder Scrolls games appeal to most players not because of the writing and the standard fantasy setting, but because of the deep, complex, highly interactive game worlds that have so many moving parts that they allow every player to set his or her own pace and tell his or her own unique tale. Does this one succeed there?

Massively single player

The Elder Scrolls Online’s gameplay looks like Skyrim on the surface. It has the same UI elements, similar music and sound effects, and a combat system that’s actually a lot of fun for its relative simplicity.

In the process of making the game look and feel like Skyrim, ZeniMax designed all the quests to be played solo. That means you’ll usually find other players to be merely a distracting nuisance. It’s good to make friends for the dungeons and player vs. player battles, but those constitute a small portion of the gameplay.

Given that the game plays like a single-player game, it lends itself to comparison to the other games in the series, but the design choices that aren’t skin-deep emulate World of Warcraft instead of Skyrim, and that stops the open-ended Elder Scrolls fun in its tracks.

The most damning thing I can say about The Elder Scrolls Online is that when I played Skyrim, I couldn't put it down for weeks. I was so engaged by its spontaneous and malleable world, I impulsively played it every day for nearly a year. When I played The Elder Scrolls Online, it took willpower to keep going through the rigid, monotonous grind of identical, pre-canned quests.

Adventures in missing the point

Todd Howard, the Creative Director for the single-player franchise, has given keynote speeches and interviews about what he believes makes the franchise so special: the player’s ability to direct the experience, and tell his or her own story.

When The A.V. Club reviewed Skyrim back in 2011, it wrote, "Where many games with lavish production values seek to direct players' imaginations, Skyrim seeks to ignite them."

I’m sorry to report that at almost every opportunity, The Elder Scrolls Online violates that principle. There are plenty of examples, but one really stands out: the game world is rigidly segmented.

All of The Elder Scrolls Online’s content is divided by level, so if you try to move on beyond the path the developers have laid down for you, and you'll quickly be killed. You must level up your character to proceed, and doing that necessitates sticking to a very clearly defined route through the world. It's their imagination, not yours, and they won’t let you forget it.

Gone is the sense of exploration and freedom. Gone is the ability to wander to whatever corner of the world you want to tell your story. It’s bewildering to see that ZeniMax missed that mark so completely, especially given that there have been many MMOs over the years that were actually more like Skyrim or Oblivion than this one.

Why did ZeniMax draw inspiration from World of Warcraft– a game whose highly directed experience is counter to the emergent freedom of The Elder Scrolls – rather than Ultima Online, EVE Online, Meridian 59 and others that are more spiritually similar to what franchise fans know and love?

Living in a shadow

Based on the developers’ roadmap for new content, they're doubling down on making The Elder Scrolls Online a World of Warcraft rival. It’s okay as a WoW rival, but there are so many already, and it’s only better as a multi-player game than about half of them. Most importantly, it’s not better than WoW.

Hardcore WoW and modern MMO fans like numbers-crunching, brutally complicated boss encounters, and prescribed player roles for tackling content together. None of those things sound very Elder Scrolls-like, so ZeniMax has compromised all of them to please the franchise fans.

This game has multi-player dungeons and raids, guilds for trading and friend-making, and massive battles of clashing player factions – all that great MMO stuff. But none of that holds a candle to WoW’s take.

After 10 years, WoW stands on top because despite it has aggressively refined itself, invigorated itself with new ideas, and out-innovated every competitor to date, including this one. It’s the purest, best form of what it does. No one has yet done better.

There are so many more wonderful gameplay possibilities intrinsic in the idea of thousands of players inhabiting a world together that the WoW formula can’t accommodate, so it’s a pity recent MMOs have only tried to emulate it. The Elder Scrolls’ unique take on player agency and emergent storytelling could have acted as a baseline for doing something different, but that’s not the choice that was made here.

Maybe it should have been. If WoW is unbeatable on its own terms, the only answer is to come up with new ones.

If The Elder Scrolls Online is a WoW-killer that doesn't kill WoW, and an Elder Scrolls game that doesn't play like an Elder Scrolls game, then what is it? I’m not sure even ZeniMax knows, but maybe it will figure it out after a couple of years. That’s the bet you make by investing in this title.

Product Name

The Good

Beautiful environment and character design • Tons of lore for franchise fans to uncover • Character customization sets it apart from more restrictive competitors

The Bad

Game design is counter to the franchise’s core values • Writing is verbose, repetitive, and unoriginal • Multi-player feels like an afterthought amidst so much single-player-oriented content • Doesn’t do anything World of Warcraft and other MMOs haven’t done just as well

The Bottom Line

The Elder Scrolls Online tries to please both fans of the single-player franchise and veterans of the WoW online formula, but each genre’s appeal is so counter to the other that The Elder Scrolls Online ends up average at best for both audiences.

Samuel Axon is a digital content producer in New York City. He has worked as an editor at Engadget, Mashable and the Joystiq network, and currently leads content strategy as Editorial Director at Sprout Social.

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